Boxee Drops Hulu Support 375
frdmfghtr writes "According to a boxee blog entry, Hulu will no longer be supported. From the post: 'two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.' Reading the hulu blog post, the only 'issue' I see facing Hulu is that content providers have (once again) shot themselves in the foot, switching off a media conduit they should have been promoting." Update: 02/19 14:31 GMT by T : Jamie points out this interesting (speculative) piece at O'Reilly Radar about the thought process that may have driven the decision.
No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
...no viewership from me for hulu. Anywhere. First tv.com now boxee. It's a sign of these illogical times that hulu allow anyone to embed their videos in any web page, but then would force a application that sends hundreds of thousands of streams of traffic to them to drop their service.
Cable companies' (who are clearly pressuring content providers) subscriptions are already falling. I'm one of those people who have dropped it. Lest that trend continue though, we can't make it TOO easy for people to watch video online now, can we? Continually making it more difficult to get to online video won't save the cable companies' bloated overpriced businesses. It may well sacrifice hulu's, though...
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
You really think that's Hulu's fault, or something that Hulu has real control over?
Hulu has a choice: They can provide a good assortment of content playing by the content provider's rules, or they can provide very little content any way they damn well please. So far, evidence shows that Hulu has made the right choices.
What is boxee? (Score:5, Insightful)
That kinda blows...
Re:What is boxee? (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't know what Boxee [wikipedia.org] was either (although it wasn't that tough to educate myself). You can understand fanaticism - More or less open, but with limited Windows support - Woot!
But really, this doesn't really make me hate Hulu. They've got a solid business model - Provide content to US viewers (or people using a US-based proxy) and provide ad-supported content based on the restrictions imposed by the content providers. What's so wrong about that? They've accepted that media distribution is changing, accepted that laws restrict them to a limited number of choices, and have found a good niche. What's so wrong with that? Should every business buck the system and risk annihilation rather than find a profitable model within the system to expand options while the model shifts due to cavaliers like TPB?
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Hulu is abitrarily restricting what clients they will allow access.
It's as if they suddenly decided that Opera and Firefox would no longer be allowed.
While it's their perogative to be morons, it sucks if you are an end user.
Re:What is boxee? (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA, this is not at all an arbitrary move on Hulu's part. It's an arbitrary move on the part of the content owners that Hulu has decided to comply with.
Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence â" bumps and all â" we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.
Hulu has always caved in to demands from the content providers. That's what has worked for them, so they'll continue to do it. Call them shills if you want, but if you think that you can do a better job while ignoring demands from the networks, give it a try. Good luck with that.
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http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/11/1344200 [slashdot.org]
Re:What is boxee? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxee [wikipedia.org]
Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Marketed as the first ever "'Social Media Center", Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV, and Linux for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008. A Microsoft Windows Alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.
Boxee said in 2009 they are planning on releasing their own dedicated set-top box (hardware) for Boxee, and also plan to license their Boxee media center and social networking service as a third-party software component to other companies for them to use the Boxee software in their hardware, such as set-top boxes from cable-TV companies or embedded computers built-in directly into television-sets. Boxee has also stated that their goal is to have Boxee run on as many third-party hardware platforms and operating systems as possible.
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You really think that's Hulu's fault, or something that Hulu has real control over?
From the O'Reilly article:
Let's control ads on the Internet by putting them on our "content" through Hulu, an entertainment industry company, not a smelly nerd company.
Hulu's in the back pocket of the MPAA. Right.
As far as Hulu's concerned, "any way they damn well please" is whatever the studios damn well please. The only right choice they made was to bend over for the studios, except now they're starting to feel the sting.
IYKWIM, AITYD
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as how Hulu is owned by NBC and Newscorp, yes and yes. They ARE the content owners, and as we've seen time and again, content owners are self righteous idiots.
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Yes, it's great for me to see blogs with embedded videos saying "FUCK OFF IF YOU'RE NOT AMERICAN". Great choice. (Since most of the blog posters are blissfully unaware that's what we, outside the chosen land, see.)
Back to grotty old Youtube.
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Yep, sort of like how the BBC treats me when I go to it's website. It isn't just American companies that pull that stunt.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is just stupid.
If another company (or even a Hulu branch) wants to provide limited content to a wide audience, that's just fine - It may even be a good idea. But that's not what Hulu is doing. They're providing access to (mainly) US-generated entertainment to US-residents. (As a side note, my guess is that US-residents consume much more than 5% of the US-generated entertainment marker. Scaling by world-wide population is kind of a dumb metric for such a thing.) Even if it is more profitable to provide limited media to a wide audience, it doesn't mean that providing more popular content to a limited market base is a bad idea. Both can be profitable as parallel ventures.
Despite your mocking tone, sarcasm, and terminating your post with an LOL (which obviously show that you're far more knowledgeable than the parent), Mononke is absolutely right in that Hulu has made good choices and has established itself in a solid position in the market. If you think that they've neglected a good opportunity by expanding their base while limiting their content, make yourself rich by doing it better.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure whether or not you're just trolling, but I'll bite.
From its very inception, [Hulu] has been little more than Youtube's retarded big-media cousin.
Youtube has this nasty habit of withdrawing copyrighted content when the content-owner complains. Hulu, on the other hand, has worked with the networks to legally circumvent this little snag. That's a big difference for those of us that like watching some of the stuff that Youtube can't legally host.
To me, Hulu doesn't "get it". They're like basic cable TV for your web browser, with all the drawbacks of network programming and few of the benefits of internet distribution.
Basic cable cable doesn't offer on-demand viewing of all of the most popular shows. I'd say it's like basic cable for your web-browser that has DVRed everything with a significant viewer base. That seems like a pretty big "benefit of Internet distribution" and one eliminated "drawback of network programming".
Mindless celebrities plug it everywhere they go...
Personally I have never seen that, but I'll assume that it's true. That said, if mindless celebrities are wrong, I don't want to be right. =)
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Fool, conscious of his own ignorance, looks at the world and attempts to adapt himself. When he does so effectively, he becomes the Wise and stops looking at the world. Then when the world changes, the Wise must become Fools again before they can begin to become Wise again. Until they succeed, they're the Insane.
There is no such thing as progress, there is only the changing external world and our endless struggle to effectively mirror it within our internal world.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
A fool knows not that he is a fool. The wise is simply a fool that is conscious of his own ignorance.
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This is why anytime I hear someone say they are sure of something I just smile and nod.
Really? Dude, I'm sure you owe me $500.
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>>The Fool, conscious of his own ignorance
Going back to the start of western philosophy with Socrates, the only real solid wisdom we have is that we as a people know only a minimal fraction of what exists, and only a fool believes he completely understands much of anything. It is only the wise man who knows the faintest hint of his own ignorance.
It is not so much reality that changes, but our limited understanding of it as a people. Progress is where we get further along in our verified understandin
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not rediculous at all.
Hulu is engaging in pointless restrictions. They're like
some country club that would never let Tiger Woods play
unless he was the reigning golf champion (and perhaps
not even then).
This is arbitrary. Boxee wasn't even doing anything
against their terms of service or against their
interests really.
The web should not be fragmented by that sort of petty exclusion.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
So everyone goes back to viewing their tv shows with no ads from Pirate Bay. ~shrug~ people used Hulu on Boxee because it was easier even if the ads were a bit annoying, now that they've taken it away it'll just be status quo.
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Or Mininova.
As Hulu has moved to RTMPE (shutting down rtmpdump), I have moved back to Mininova.
My HTPC in the living room simply isn't fast enough for Hulu because their player is so broken, despite being able to easily play back rtmpdumped FLVs of Hulu content with SMPlayer.
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Totally agreed. I have many options for downloading higher quality ad-free shows. I used hulu through boxee and put up with the ads because it was easier. If I have to mess around with a keyboard/mouse to watch a show- its going to be to download the high quality ad-free version.
Hulu = Apple a few years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hulu = Apple a few years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
Hulu's not trying to teach the studios anything, because Hulu IS the studios. They are owned and controlled by NBC.
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Exactly. I was looking forward to getting caught up on "The office" with the gf via Hulu. Looks like we're going to be watching in MythTV instead since MythVodka isn't up to snuff yet.
The media PC is coming to the living room, old media just doesn't seem to know what to do. I've been watching soley recorded content for a while and my roommates are slowly shifting that way too.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:5, Insightful)
Back? When did we stop?
And I think the hypothesis in the summary is correct. They thought people were watching Hulu on computer. Because they're apparently complete and total morons who don't understand the different between computers and TVs is...nothing.
I'm going to explain this carefully to the TV companies:
I literally have not watched an ad on TV in three years, cause my 'TV' is hooked to a computer that runs utorrent downloading an rss feed, and a program called gbpvr. This is a 'computer' that serves the purpose of a DVD player. It's not some tiny screen, it's hooked to my actual main TV, and only to that. It has a remote control on it.
It is a computer by technical definition, but I want you goofs to think of it as a TiVo that illegally downloads TV shows. I went to bed last time, and I woke up with Lost, Lie to Me, Knight Rider, and Life on Mars downloaded. Without ads. For free. With an interface I can operate like a TiVo, with a remote, on a television.
This system wasn't hard to setup. The hardware requirement was a $40 remote control and an old computer. The two pieces of software were both free. In terms of technical skill required, it wasn't much at all.
To recap: I can walk into my living room, sit down at my couch and use a remote control to watch the episode of Lost that aired last night, and then delete it to make room for more. Without ads. No hassle whatsoever, it happened entirely automatically. It is there, now. It is easier to watch than using hulu in a web browser.
Now I want to tell you I'm 30. And I want you TV executives to imagine the 25% of the 18-35 year olds that are moderately technically savvy switching to my setup. Now I want you to imagine them helping their friends set it up. (There are a lot of old computers out there.)
I will give you a second to change your underwear. Are you people perhaps grasping the fucking seriousness of your situation?
There is one, and exactly one, way for you to show me an ad: Some sort of automatic downloading application (Not real-time streaming crap. I don't have infinite bandwidth.) that lets me subscribe to TV shows and download and watch them. Like I do now, but legally.
If you would provide this, I would switch. Even if the shows had ads. Away from the same system without ads. I'm okay with ads, I understand that's how you make your money. Other people might not be so noble, but if your application was easier to use, and came with a remote control, they'd never set anything up...but once they do, they aren't switching.
However, my choices now are the current system, and fucking stupid hulu in a web browser that I can't operate with a remote control and stutters if I'm downloading something else. I'd never heard of boxee, might have used that too if I knew about it (Although I hate streaming), but congrats on breaking that.
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It's not just that. The channels themselves are often the content partners, and ads on cable TV or regular TV easily fetch ten times the money that of online video ads do, if not much more. So with that nugget of information, it's easy to understand why they don't like a box that's going to be used a lot like a cable box, but only give them 5-10% of the revenue for the same content. I'm not saying that excuses the fact that they can't see that's how it is going to be that way.
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I'm a gradstudent and my wife is pregnant. We need every penny we can save, and cable was not worth the money at $60/mo for basic service and a DVR to make it remotely worthwhile. Now I'll just go back to reading books, watching my DVD's, listening to music, playing video games,
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With current gasoline prices it is Not cheaper. Cheaper is sitting at home and watching Knight Rider on hulu.com or nbc.com, and thereby not burning any gasoline.
Re:No hulu for boxee means... (Score:4, Interesting)
Firstly, if the person is watching the show on a Boxee or Hulu, you can partly figure they're not watching it on some traditional medium such as cable TV.
So following that logic, basically they're forgoing 5-10% additional revenue they'd get because now the person is going to go to mininova and download the same show sans their ads instead of watching it on hulu or a boxee.
Though it should be noted this industry has had a long and protracted history of doing things that make utterly no sense because instead of embracing technology and getting ahead of the curve they're being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
What's odder is that, while flawed in a several ways Hulu was actually a step in the right direction...
Oh noes (Score:5, Funny)
$buzzword1 won't be supporting $buzzword2
the correct response (Score:5, Insightful)
would seem be for Hulu to provide a link or three at the bottom of that notice saying "if you disagree with this, we suggest you have your voice heard by .... " with links, phone numbers, email addresses, mailboxes, etc. If the "content providers" aren't listening to Hulu (or boxee) then maybe they'll listen to mobs of their customers?
I'm very surprised they didn't do this.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hulu seem to be quite resistant to naming them.
Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, RCN...
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My plugin is a browser you insensitive clod.
But seriously, how hard would it be for Boxee to just run the Hulu SWF file directly? Sure the interface might not be as cool, but it's not as if they can actually block it.
Or... (Score:2, Insightful)
...if they do not, folks who do not like the changes can simply abandon Hulu.com for other avenues.
Honestly, I'm hard-pressed to find anything worth the hassle on the site anyway, though tastes obviously differ.
It's obvious that (unlike the music industry) the TV industry is at least trying to adapt to the web. That said, the time is pretty ripe for a hungry start-up or a bored zillionaire to start providing Internet-only broadcasting in a way that appeals, with shows that entertain.
The economy doesn't have
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They've probably done all they can get away with by blogging and saying that it's not their decision, but is the content owners' instead. If that's not enough for people to get active, then actually giving email addresses isn't going to help much.
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I believe the content providers and Hulu are one and the same?
I found this link in one of the boxee forums.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305877,00.html [foxnews.com]
I believe all the huffing/puffing from the Boxee community is not going to make the house fall down.
No Ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I watch Hulu on XBMC. It just hooks into the video stream directly. The ads on the website are inserted by the flash player. No flash, no ads. This is probably behind this decision.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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What if the rack-rate per minute for advertising was quite a bit bigger on TV than on Hulu?
Does it make more sense now?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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What if the rack-rate per minute for advertising was quite a bit bigger on TV than on Hulu?
Does it make more sense now?
... No? Why should it matter what monitor I use to see the same content? Whether through a web browser or through Boxee I'm still seeing the same content, the same ads, and over the same network. This breaks down to the content providers saying, "You can view my show through FireFox, IE, Safari, etc., but not through Boxee. The vowel/consonant ratio is a bit too high with that one.
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What are you using to watch stuff on XBMC? The script installers do nothing to help along those lines... Unless you want Youtube or AMT.
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I manually installed the Hulu plugin on the newest T3CH release of XBMC. Here's [xbmc.org] the plugin, but apparently it's broken right now.
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This was true until yesterday, when hulu.com removed the plaintext PIDs which the xbmc hulu plugin used. Hopefully they will be able to work around it (decrypting the encrypted PIDs) but until then no more hulu on xbmc.
Re:No Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
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Boxee goes directly to Hulu to get the content whereas I think XBMC is served from your computer which goes to Hulu.
XBMC is just a program like windows media player except better, and with python scripting. It runs on OSX, Windows 2000+, and the Xbox. It uses mplayer and IIRC ffdshow to do the heavy lifting.
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You mean you used to watch Hulu on XBMC. No more.
Shocking!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Content providers trying to prevent change from occurring?? That is shocking!! Shocking I tell you...
With the traditional players now imploding due to reduced of marketing dollar flows, I think it is only a matter of time before these players that the good old days are gone..
It's all about control (Score:5, Insightful)
Control=$
That's why DRM exists.
That's why "fair use" is "bad".
and by a stretch, that why we have the war on drugs. You wouldn't want cheap antidepressants or cancer drugs (like Cannabis), now would you ?
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http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=6814 [norml.org]
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312132,00.html [foxnews.com]
http://cannazine.co.uk/cannabis-news/united-states/marijuana-can-prevent-cancer-not-cause-it.html [cannazine.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3655586.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Now who looks stupid?
Hulu drops boxee support (Score:5, Insightful)
Lame. (Score:2)
What would honestly make the most sense, in my mind, is if the network that owned the rights to shows just had them stream from their own sites. Your media box could even call them something crazy, like "channels."
Re:Lame. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, they don't want Hulu to replace cable as the medium of choice for nontechy/convenience oriented users. If getting a Hulu set top box is just as easy as getting a cable set top box, and costs a great deal less, then cable loses. The media overlords don't really want that.
Re:Lame. (Score:4, Insightful)
You are of course correct. The media providers similarly fought cheap distribution of movies - VHS was going to kill the movie theatre.
Then DVDs were going to kill the incredibly lucrative sale-of-movies industry (the one the MPAA didn't want) because you'll
only ever sell one copy of a movie. Except of course until HD-DVD and Bluray came out and people wanted a better copy of the same movie.
In fact bluray and HDDVD are a perfect example of something incrementally that gives more control to the media people, costs more
and doesn't offer much more to the consumer in benefit. Hence the tepid adoption. What's my point? The content providers are already
suppliers of streamed content, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, yet. Right now we have torrents (out of the control but highly
adopted), and hulu (in their control, but not as widely used). Isn't it obvious that these content providers should be working
with cable companies to form a streaming hub/spoke system so that their content is digitally packaged and forwarded? IPTV FTW, baby.
Make Hulu Open Source! (Score:5, Funny)
It is obvious that the best path to maximize its user uptake is to make Hulu an OSS project. With the experience, dedication and level-headness of the millions of developers in the open source community, it will be certain that Hulu would achieve new heights.
Hulu could incorporate new functionality such as streaming MIDI files, Ogg visualation routines, Excel macro optimizations, and banner ad removal for Chrome and Firefox. Perhaps using the GPL v3 as the basic licensing framework would also provide us with the support of Bruce Perens and Bruce Schneier (not related).
Only when we focus our efforts in media content delivery engines can we wrest control of the net neutrality paradigm from DoubleClick.
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The only fly in your ointment is that you don't seem to have taken the media content providers into account. 'Ad removal'? You just lost your media providers right there.
Good luck delivering nonexistent content
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Hulu without syndicated content from the networks is nothing but a video blog. Yes it's a very well designed video blog but it's true value is the ability to syndicate content and insert ads into the stream.
One thing I've never understood (Score:2)
when you're just starting out trying to get your content out there, you post it practically everywhere to get exposure.
At what point of growth do you go "fuck this small player" - I just don't understand. In the content industry you need as much exposure as you can get. Even if something comes along that's new and small, it's still a content delivery system so why not put your content on it?
Can anyone explain to me the mentality here? Anyone?
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Molo drops Empoor support on Ekkienong Doodad (Score:5, Funny)
In a shocking twist, Mknnnr was also found to have backstabbed Hoolihooli in a deal with Farnanook.
In unrelated news, it has been found that 98% of "Web 2.0" business names are created by cats walking on keyboards. Footage at 11.
Hulu what? (Score:3, Insightful)
ARRRRRRR!! (Score:3, Funny)
I guess it's back to the torrent channel for me and thee, then, innit? So instead of watching SOME ads, ye and me will watch a-none, with nary a soul venturing out ter get screwed again! Tis so brilliant a move it could have only come from NBC/Universal! Those bleeding rotters only know how to lose money naught how ter be making it, so me boys will ignore th fools and hoist ye jolly roger we will...
See ye and thee at th' bay laddies!
--bornagainpenguin
Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fear (Score:4, Insightful)
Aaaand...in doing it, they ended up hurting the known revenue source. Boxee wasn't stripping the ads- so they were getting money via their known source. They just couldn't control it as well as they could with the Hulu website.
Now, they'll have less takers.
No, this was more about Hulu potentially endangering the higher revenue bringing TV and Cable advertising deals.
And what would Boxee be? (Score:3, Insightful)
And what would Boxee be, pray tell? I went to the site, and all I see is a page that asks me to log in. No information on what Boxee would be - no "What is Boxee?" or "Information about Boxee" or "Why you should give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Boxee".
It looks to me like the standard Web 2.0 "We are so tragically hip that we cannot see over our own pelvis, and if you don't know what we are by osmosis, then you are so terribly uncool we wouldn't want to deal with you anyway."
Then there's the little issue of the Boxee blog not having a link back to the main site - good web site design there guys. Yes, *I* know to edit the URL to get to the main site, but amazingly enough guys, there are people in this world who don't know that little trick (though I suppose they, too, fall into the "terribly uncool" group which with you would rather not be bothered).
And of course, neither the story submitter nor the <cough>editors[sic]<cough> could be bothered to actually link to any such explanation.
Oh well - my guess is that whatever Boxee is, it will follow the same trajectory most Web 2.0 objects follow, so perhaps when the inevitable "Boxee goes bust" story is posted on /. that may give some clues as to what the remains used to be.
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And what would Boxee be, pray tell? I went to the site, and all I see is a page that asks me to log in. No information on what Boxee would be - no "What is Boxee?" or "Information about Boxee" or "Why you should give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about Boxee".
If you need a streaming video to explain your product, you are not smart enough to sell it.
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For unwashed and uneducated who cannot bother to search Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxee [wikipedia.org]
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It's an offshoot of XBMC that is designed more for streaming and less for Media center use. It's cute but Myself and my family like XBMC better.
Honestly I dont see why everyone was all in love with hulu anyways, If I wanted to watch really low res versions of TV Id watch it off my PVR. I'm after HD versions... that's where eztv.it fills the bill.
tired of content providers dragging their butt on my carpet. They want my eyeballs? they gotta server it up on my terms.
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Boxee does not appear to be terribly interested in generating traffic to their site... they are not a "Web 2.0" company. Rather, they are trying to develop software that can be loaded onto a set-top box. They seem to hope to make money licensing this package to hardware makers.
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It's all about segmentation and more segmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Why isn't Hulu.com available outside the US? Because they need to segment the market to sell country specific ads.
Why isn't Boxee allowed to stream Hulu content? Because they want to segment the ad market into "Hulu ads" and "Non-Hulu/Other ads"
Why do DVDs still get released with Region codes? Because they want to segment the market to sell the same stuff at different prices and make ad contracts for different regions so they can earn a manifold of income.
Why is there still no simultaneous release of movies if many people watch them with subtitles or in English anyway? Because they want to segment the market into the respective "exploitation" zones to draw money out.
Some of these things are happening because the industry wanted them, some because our stupid societies still believe they need borders and nationalities to function and thus establish different tax systems. It could all be so easy if you would only let it get more complicated
Until this is resolved I'm at the Pirate Bay, watching KingKong, sipping Cider and laughing at all those idiots that still bother to screw around with that antiquated segmentation.
Send a comment to Hulu (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.hulu.com/videos/search?query=contact [hulu.com]
No it doesn't bring up a contact page, but scroll to the bottom and there's a little link "Didn't find what you wanted? Click here to let us know" which pops up a contact box.... use it to let them know how you feel.
In order to change the "direction" (Score:2)
We need to let the people who really pay for TV shows know how we want our content.
A lot of people think that the cable/sat subscribers are whom pay, but they would be wrong.
We need to start letting advertisers know, that we want our content "free", as they are the ones that truly pay for the shows.
Strange Business Model (Score:2, Interesting)
After reading that speculative piece over at O'Reilly, I really have to wonder exactly how their business model works. I know the networks hate DVR, but they have more or less come to accept it as long as you watch the commercials. What I fail to see is why they would be against watching a lower quality version at a later point with current commercials as opposed to watching a DVR'd version at a later point with potentially outdated commercials.
I think Hulu is great for when I miss a show but if I am around
Long live TikiBar.tv (Score:2)
Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.
The above quote is from the Hulu Blog. The Their is obviously the "content providers", AKA the losers.
I can watch TikiBar, and wish it were more than 5 minutes long. I was about to Boxee my Apple TV for Hulu. But frankly I'm fine with free video podcasts, TikiBar, TED Talks, NASA, etc.
Hope for More Open Distribution/Revenue Models (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh, this reminds me of how the networks pressured NetFlix into killing their Red Envelope independent publishing division. Every time I see something like this, I lose some of the hope that new, more open distribution models will win out over industry inertia.
Mistake in Radar Oreilly article (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm... there's a mistake in the radar.oreilly article. It was pretty jarring to read it, it concerns Divx. The author has confused Divx Discs with Self-Destruct DVDs that rot when exposed to air. I mean they are both bad technologies, and arguably are intended to acheive the same goal, but they are still different.
Divx was a complicated technology that was designed to lock out Divx discs from playing in certain circumstances. For instance, you "buy" a Divx DVD for the cheapest price available, and then you are locked out of watching it again until you "buy" it again. Or you get the "Gold Divx" subscription (not available for all Divx Discs), and you can theoretically watch the disk an unlimited number of times... on the particular Divx player you had the Gold subscription for that particular Divx disk on.
As Penny Arcade thoughtfully pointed out, Divx disks were hewn cold from the bones of the stillborn. [penny-arcade.com] They were thought up by Satan, Disney, some entertainment industry lawyers, and Circuit City where service is state of the art. (Rot in Hell, Circuit City!)
The concept behind Divx hasn't gone away, but nowadays it's more likely to be applied to video games. This is because just as Divx was supposed to eliminate the very concept of first sale and used DVDs, you now hear video game companies whining about the used video game market. (They'll get a wakeup call soon though, their industry isn't as recession proof as they thought and the used video game market will soon be the least of their worries.)
Content Providers Need To Be In Control (Score:4, Insightful)
Hulu.com is a joint venture between NBC and Fox. So the "content providers" is code name for "the people who own and pay me". So the hulu guys saying, "we feel real bad about this" is BS.
If you remember this, ESPN's Play To Make ISPs Pay [slashdot.org], you might start to understand what's going on here. The content providers want to get paid to have their content on the internet. They are trying use the same cable/satellite business model with ISP's. How else can the make someone buy unpopular content Y when they want to show their popular content X. It's about greed on the content providers end. They have no control if us people can watch whatever they want, whenever they want to.
My "solution"... (Score:2)
Boxee is great for pulling my TV shows & Movies ripped from my DVD collection off of my NAS, but I can't tell you how many times I've had people over and just found something on Hulu to watch, like the latest episode of 30 Rock or American Dad. This move kills one of the biggest reasons to use boxee for me.
There are loads of bugs in it that I want fixed, but if there's no more hulu, then what's the point?
Re: (Score:2)
Boxxy is our queen (Score:2, Informative)
Boxxy is our queen
Boxxy is our queen
Cancel your hulu account (Score:4, Informative)
I just went and canceled my hulu account and emailed them why. I imagine their advertising revenue depends on those accounts, so anyone who has an account on hulu - get out there and cancel it! Let them know why also: feedback@hulu.com
Understudy (Score:3)
So why not mod Boxee to appear as Firefox to Hulu? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I am missing something, but Boxee is ultimately software, right?
So why can't the Boxee people program their software to look like a regular web browser on a regular computer to Hulu's servers, making Boxee indistinguishable to those providers who would care?
Sort of like a User Agent Switcher for a media player? It seems to me that would be a big "FU" to the content providers, a big win for viewers, and Hulu is left out of the loop altogether so they're not to blame.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well if you'd stop visiting that cancer filled shithole you wouldn't see any posts about her.
Re: (Score:2)
Hi, I'm here to serve notice: rectal cancer is suing for defamation.
Re:Hulu sucks...period (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly the world's most brilliant plan.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It does work in Europe, but it's kinda boring. Apparently it's a flash applet which displays white text on a black background.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You insensitive clod, I watch Hulu on my TV via Boxee... that's the whole point.
Fringe, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Psych, Monk, Burn Notice, Damages, Lie to Me.. all on Hulu - plus Nova, Nasa TV, the Daily Show, SNL - all on Hulu.
I don't have to pay an extra $50 / month for cable/sat - just my internet connection.
Re:What's Hulu? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing I find amusing about this, is that they are stopping people now that they have gotten used to it. It will drive the more savvy to look around online for other options. And they will find things like bittorrent.
So they are driving people to the "illegal" ways of getting the exact same thing. And people are now less likely to see a moral problem with doing so since they were doing it with hulu just till they broke it. So now they get zero revenue from it, and people are still watching the shows from online sources. With the current software out there for automating the downloads, it's even better than Hulu for a lot of things. And you can get the shows in HD! Much of the stuff is easy enough for even my parents to use.